Of his takeover of France, Napoleon famously commented that all he had to do was to pick up the crown that was lying in the gutter. Plenty of senators and influential members of the House could fill it by proposing their own alternative visions and trying to get them implemented, which is their job. Tom Cotton has taken steps in this direction when it comes to immigration. Mike Lee and Marco Rubio are also candidates; their insistence on including a large child tax credit in the tax bill is quite laudable. But while this represents an implicit vision of what the GOP's tax vision should be, it is not an explicit one. Ivanka might be able to fill that role! Like him or not, Stephen Bannon definitely tried to do it, and got expelled as a result. The crown is in the gutter.

PTR:

The article was fine, but nobody doubts that the GOP lacks leadership, and it's pretty clear why - Ex: Donald Trump's 2013 response to the The Growth and Opportunity Project.

With someone like that ostensibly wearing the crown, you're not going to see many folks scrambling over themselves to mock-up cleverly acronymed, 100 page analyses on why crowns get guttered in the first place.

I get what Gobry's trying to do, tying the GOP's historical frenetics to a lack of direction to incompetence - that's fair, and it's what they've created for themselves by making a reactionary, issue-specific platform. But this is a new breed of incompetence, and it's origin is the author of 140-character tweets.

posted 2345 days ago